Sports Team – “Happy (God’s Own Country)”
![](https://static.stereogum.com/uploads/2021/04/Sports-Team-1619013182.jpg)
Last year, the twitchy and rambunctious London indie rock band Sports Team released their debut album Deep Down Happy, which turned out to be a weird little hit. As detailed in this Stereogum feature, Deep Down Happy debuted at #2 on the UK charts, coming very close to knocking off Lady Gaga, and it also got nominated for the Mercury Prize. The band achieved rare-for-indie rock levels of visibility on the strength of memes and their extremely active WhatsApp community, and they also did it by being pretty good! Today, the band has dropped “Happy (God’s Own Country),” their first single since that whole debut-album triumph, and it’s pretty good, too.
The band started teasing the release of “Happy (God’s Own Country)” on Twitter yesterday, and the song itself arrived on YouTube, possibly ahead of schedule, this morning. It’s a big, juicy postpunk song. On this one, Sports Team sound like a happier version of the Fall, or maybe a more jagged version of mid-period Blur, or maybe like Parquet Courts with British accents. It’s a short, fun electric shock of a song, and you can hear it below.
Check out our feature on Sports Team here.